Valder mulled that over; somehow, he was not surprised. He thought that he might have suspected it to be true all along, on some unconscious level, or perhaps had once heard it explained, long ago, by a wizard studying the sword.
At last he rose, saying politely, “Thank you for your help; I have one more favor to ask. Could you direct me to a good diviner or seer?”
Tagger, too, arose. “Certainly; I would recommend either Sella the Witch, across the street and down two blocks to the east, or Lurenna of Tantashar, four blocks west.”
“Lurenna is a wizard, or another witch?”
“A wizard. There are also a few theurgists who deal in prophecy and divination...”
“No, a wizard is fine.” Valder bowed and departed.
He paused for a moment at the door, noticing for the first time that full night had arrived while he spoke with the red-clad wizard; he was footsore and weary, feeling his age, and he considered for a moment simply finding a place to sleep and continuing in the morning.
The streets, however, were torchlit and inviting, the shop-windows mostly aglow, and he decided he would pursue matters now, having delayed so long already. He would find Lurenna of Tantashar, not in hopes that she might remove the sword’s enchantment, but rather that she might be able to locate for him a more powerful wizard who could. Tagger had said that such wizards existed.
True, he had little to offer in compensation — but he would deal with that problem when he had to. He would find a way.
Tagger watched the old man with the sword march away, then returned to the shop parlor to find that Varrin had slipped in the back way, unnoticed.
“Who was that?” the older man asked.
“Oh, an old veteran with a magic sword with a curse on it — nothing I wanted to deal with, though. Eighth-order, he said.”
Varrin shook his head. “Those idiots during the war didn’t know what they were doing, throwing around spells like that; it’s amazing we survived, let alone won.”
Tagger, who had not yet been born when the war ended, shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, reaching for the candy jar.
CHAPTER 27
Valder found Lurenna’s shop only with difficulty; reading signs by the flaring, uneven torchlight was more than his weak eyes could handle readily, and hers was small and discreet, a simple panel reading, “Lurenna of Tantashar: Your Questions Answered.”
Fortunately, the window was still lighted, behind heavy wine-red draperies. The blue-painted door, however, was securely locked; he knocked loudly.
It was a long moment before the latch slid back and the door swung in. A thin woman in a lavender gown — a color Valder had never before seen used for an entire garment — peered out at him.
“I have closed for the night,” she said.
“My apologies for disturbing you, then, but I have come a dozen leagues today to find answers to my questions.”
“Then you must be Valder the Innkeeper, here to ask about Wirikidor.” She seemed to hesitate for a moment, then said, “Come in — but I warn you, I can’t help you.”
“I have not yet said what I want.”
“I know — but I know that whatever it might be, although I will answer your questions, the answers will not be the ones you seek.”
“How can you know that?” Valder said before he could stop himself; no wizard, he still knew exactly what her reply would be.
“It’s my business to know things; why else would you come to me? I can answer my own questions as well as anyone else’s and I like to know who my customers will be and whether I will please them — though I had neglected to ask when you would come and had not expected you until morning. Now, come in and be seated.”
Valder followed her into a small room hung with wine velvet and sat down in a velvet chair by a small table. Lurenna seated herself opposite him and reached for a small velvet pouch.
“My price is fixed; I will answer three questions for a gold piece and guarantee the answers to be correct and complete. For a silver piece I can answer one question with no guarantees save that what I then tell you will be the truth.”
Valder hesitated; that was more than he had expected to pay. Still, he needed answers. He fished out one of his carefully hoarded gold pieces and tossed it on the table.
“Good; now, what are your questions?”
“Are there any limitations? Must answers be yes or no?”
“No, of course not — I would not dare charge gold for that! However, be careful just what you do or don’t ask; I will probably answer only what you say, not what you intended to say.”
That seemed fair enough. He thought for a long moment, composing his question.
“Who,” he said at last, “of all those alive today, is capable of removing the enchantment from the sword Wirikidor, which I carry?”
“And your second question?”
“Will depend upon the answer to my first.”
The wizard looked displeased. “That makes it more difficult for me, but I’ll get your answer. Wait here.” She rose and vanished behind one of the velvet draperies.
Valder waited, growing ever more bored and ever more aware of the pain in his overworked feet and his general weariness; finally, after what seemed like days, Lurenna emerged.
“I have a list of some eighty or ninety names here,” she announced. “Do you want them all?”
“I might,” Valder said, pleased.
“Have you decided upon your second question?” Lurenna asked.
“No; I hadn’t expected so long a list.” “If I might make a suggestion, what would be the consequences of removing the enchantment?”
“I had been thinking rather of where I might find the one of those ninety wizards most willing to perform the removal, but I have two questions left; very well then, what would be the consequences?”
“I have already asked that, in anticipation and to satisfy my own curiosity, you would die, and, of the wizards listed, only one, a hermit living on the Plains of Ice beyond the old Northern Empire, stands any chance of survival. The number of innocents in the area who would also die could reach as high as thirty-three.”
Valder sat, stunned.
“I told you that you would not be pleased by my answers; when the first seemed so promising I could not resist asking my own questions.” The wizard seemed almost to be gloating.
“This hermit in the far north — what of him?”
“Is that your third question?”
“No! No, it isn’t. Wait a moment.”
“The hermit knows you of old, apparently, and would probably refuse to aid you in anything whatsoever. Furthermore, because his surprisingly powerful magical aura interfered with my spells, I could not determine the extent of harm that might be done to you or to him if he were to try to remove the sword’s spells. I give you this answer free of charge, and you have one question left.”
Valder sat for a moment, then finally asked what he realized should have been his first question. He had more gold, if necessary, and could ask further questions.
“My question is this: What are all the possible ways in which I might be freed of the enchantment linking me to the sword Wirikidor?”
Lurenna smiled. “That’s a much better question; it may take some time, however. Would you prefer to return tomorrow?”
“I’ll wait,” Valder replied.
“As you wish,” she said as she rose and again vanished behind the drapery.
The wait this time seemed even longer than before — and in truth, it was longer than before. Unable to sit still, Valder at last rose and went to the door, only to discover that outside the street was dark and empty, the torches doused or burned out, the shops shuttered tightly, their lamps extinguished, and the people gone to their homes. The sky was clouded with the city’s smoke, so that he could not judge the hour from the stars, but Valder guessed it to be midnight or later. He had, he remembered, arrived at this shop shortly after full dark; whatever spells Lurenna mi
ght be working, they obviously took time.
There was nothing to see on the deserted street; he returned to his chair and waited.
He had dozed off before Lurenna returned; he awoke with a start to find her staring at him, a sheet of parchment in her hand.
He stared back for a moment, then said, “Well?”
“No, I’m afraid it is not well at all.” She held up the parchment. “I had to ask a second question, for which I will not charge you. The answer to your original question was very brief, very simple; you may only be free of Wirikidor with your death. No other possibility exists anywhere that wizardry holds sway — and wizardry, of course, holds everywhere. My second question, then, was by what means might you die — I promised you a complete answer, after all, and you paid me on that basis. There are only two ways in which you can die; I was surprised, I will admit, to find that out, since most men may die in any number of ways. You, however, may be slain only by another’s hand drawing and wielding Wirikidor, or by a magical spell powerful enough to break the enchantment, thereby killing you, destroying the sword, and slaying the spell’s wielder in an explosive release of the arcane forces pent in the sword. The wizard who cast the original spell, whether intentionally or not, booby-trapped it quite effectively.”
Valder continued to stare at the wizard for a long moment. “You’re certain?”
“Absolutely. I’ll swear it by any terms you might choose.”
“You said that I might be slain only any another’s hand; can I not kill myself?”
“No; the sword must be drawn and wielded by another — and a man, at that.”
“But no one else can draw the sword!”
“Not until you have slain another nineteen men.”
“Nineteen? Exactly?”
“Could be eighteen, could be twenty, but it’s probably nineteen.”
“Darrend wasn’t that exact.”
“Darrend analyzed the sword a long time ago, without the spells I know, and when the spell was fresher and more chaotic.”
“I’m sixty-six years old; how am I going to kill nineteen men?”
“One at a time,” Lurenna replied with a shrug.
“There is no other way out?”
“None known to wizardry.”
“Damn wizardry!” Valder said as he turned and headed for the door.
He had forgotten, in his anger, how late it was; he looked at the empty streets in annoyance, then headed back toward Westgate, looking for an inn. He knew that he might be closer to inns near the city’s other gates, but preferred not to wander randomly in search of them.
As he walked, his anger cooled; and as his anger cooled, he thought over possible courses of action.
He could, of course, let things remain as they were and sink gradually into senility and decay that would last for as long as wizardry remained effective — forever, in short.
Or he could find one of the eighty or ninety high-level wizards capable of undoing the spell and perhaps convince him to make the attempt, thereby condemning himself, the innocent wizard, and probably others to a messy death. That assumed, of course, that one of those eighty or ninety wizards would be foolish enough to make the attempt, which seemed unlikely; surely they would be able to do their own divinations and would see the danger. The possibility that one of that group might be suicidal was too slim to bother pursuing.
That left dying on Wirikidor’s blade as the only way out, unappealing as it was; and, according to the wizards, he could not kill himself, but must use up his ownership of the weapon and then wait to be murdered. He resolved to test that theory — but not immediately. He did not feel quite ready to die yet. Besides, if he drew the sword and the wizards were right, someone else would have to die, and he had no good candidates.
If the wizards were right — and he believed that they were — he would have to kill nineteen more men, give or take a few. In peacetime that was not going to be easy.
He could, of course, do what he had been asked to do so often and go join one of the warring armies in the Small Kingdoms — but wars could cripple and maim as well as kill. Besides, old as he was and with poor eyesight, what army would want him, magic sword or not? And he did not care to kill people just because they were fighting a war; he would want to be on the side that deserved his help and he had no idea how to go about choosing the morally superior side in a petty border war where the truth about the causes of the conflict would be almost impossible to get at.
There must, he told himself, be some way of finding people who deserved to die and killing them.
That was an executioner’s job, of course, killing convicted criminals. Once before, he had slain a prisoner with Wirikidor and, although he had found it repulsive, he could think of nothing better. He resolved that, come morning, he would go to the Palace and apply for a job as an executioner.
He reached this decision somewhere in the Old Merchants’ Quarter but was distracted temporarily by the necessity of finding an inn still open for business at this late hour. By the time he found a rather dirty and unappealing one a few blocks from Westgate, its sign weathered blank but shaped in a rough approximation of a gull, he had so thoroughly accepted the idea of becoming a headsman that he was wondering about such trivia as how much the job paid and what the perquisites accompanying the post might be.
CHAPTER 28
He awoke late the next morning with innumerable itches and the unclean feeling that comes from sleeping in a bed already inhabited by a great many assorted vermin; as he alternately scratched and pulled on his clothes, he thought over the events of the night before.
He had been exhausted, he realized — perhaps so much so that he had been too tired to realize just how tired he was. Still, in reviewing what he had said and done, he could find nothing he would have done very differently, had he been more alert. His questions to Lurenna might perhaps have been better used, and he wondered whether he might have talked down the price, but what had been done was done, and he had the answers he needed. Although his outlook on the world was somewhat different, now that he had slept and been eaten by bedbugs, and would presumably change somewhat more when he had himself eaten, he had no doubt of the wizard’s veracity. She had been recommended by Tagger, after all, whom Valder had trusted because he had not claimed to be able to do more than he could. For that matter, were Lurenna less than she claimed, she would most likely have given him more encouraging answers and would not have stretched his three questions to the five she had actually answered.
That meant that there was no easy way out of his situation; he would have to kill nineteen men before he himself could be murdered, and the only way he could see to do that without the slaughtering of innocents or undue hardship for himself was to become an executioner.
In the cold light of morning, however, as he struggled to pull his boots onto swollen feet, becoming an executioner did not seem quite so simple. Just how did one become an executioner? To whom did he apply? Could he just walk up to the Palace and ask? Or was that a military job, in which case he should ask at the gatehouse?
The gatehouse was certainly closer than the Palace; once he was dressed and had gathered his belongings, he headed downstairs with every intention of proceeding directly to the gate — until the smell of cooking bacon reached him and reminded him that he had not eaten, save for some stale bread and cheese at bedtime, since reaching the city. He had doubts about any food that this inn might provide, but decided to take the risk.
In the actual event, the food was not bad at all, and the few patrons of the Gull who were awake and present were pleasant enough. The ambitious had risen early and were already gone, while the unsavory still slept. Valder considered asking one of his more talkative tablemates about the city’s executioners, but never found an opportunity in the conversation; beheading criminals was not a subject that sprang readily to mind in cheerful breakfast chatter. Before he had managed to bring up the topic, the sitting was over and the guests departing on their va
rious errands, making way for the remaining late risers. He found the innkeeper, a huge, surly fellow, standing over him, a cleaver in one fist, and took this as a hint that his seat, too, was wanted — though he hadn’t realized the inn held that many people that it would be needed.
The innkeeper, however, seemed as likely an informant as any, and the cleaver brought the subject up as nothing else had.
“No need to use that thing, I’ll be going,” Valder said, trying to sound lightly amusing. “You’ve no call to chop off my head.”
The innkeeper stood and glared silently; Valder stood.
“Ah... speaking of chopping off heads, I’m looking for work as a headsman — I’ve been trained in the art. Whom would I speak to about such employment?”
His only training had been the standard army training in combat and his rushed indoctrination as a scout, but he saw no need to limit himself to the absolute truth.
The innnkeeper’s glare turned from simple resentment to puzzlement and wariness. “A headsman?” he said, uncomprehendingly.
“An executioner, then.”
For a long moment the Gull’s master stared in open disbelief at the master of the Thief’s Skull. “An executioner?”
“Yes; whom must I talk to?”
“The Lord Executioner, I guess,” the innkeeper said, still baffled.
“Where do I find him?”
The city-dweller shrugged. “Don’t know; the Palace, I guess.” He turned away, losing interest.
Valder watched him go, wondering how the man had ever become an innkeeper when nature had plainly intended him to be a thug of some sort, then shrugged and departed. He glanced in the direction of the gate wistfully as his boots struck the packed dirt of the street, but headed for the Palace.
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